IT WAS a sunny weekend afternoon in Oakland. At a bus stop on 40th Street, where the 57 and 14 lines stop. Bus lines that traverse Oakland, traveling along MacArthur Boulevard all the way out to the Coliseum, cutting through Eastlake and West Oakland.

An older woman wearing a straw sun hat stood, leaning down toward a baby in a stroller. She played with the baby, touching his hand, cooing, chuckling and leaning back on her heels. I think that’s what caught my eye. The baby kicked his feet and jerked his little arms in response. His mother, a little too young to be a mother, watched as she stood behind the stroller.

What really caught my eye was the fact the older woman was Asian and the too-young mother and baby were Latino. Pulled into the scene, I noticed, standing next to the mother, a slight young woman with past-her-waist-length hair. A mane of thick, very red hair that dominated her appearance. She was white, in fact, she was pale white.

My gaze traveled back in the other direction. Next to the older woman playing with the baby stood a tall, lanky man, slightly hunched. His dark copper-rich skin contrasting with his white beard. He was talking with a woman seated in a wheel chair. Judging from her white hair, she was about his age. They were both African-American.

Seated to their right was another senior, about their age, wearing a dress, with a pocketbook hooked over her wrist and resting in her lap. Her hair, also white, had a slightly bluish tint. She was white. To her right, three teenagers joked around. They were physically large, but judging from their antics, they were maybe 14, 15-years-old, laughing, playing a hit-you-last game of tag. They were African-American.

Their racial characteristics caught my eye, but their shapes and body positions told more about them as individuals. The angles their bodies formed, leaning toward or away from their neighbor, or not leaning at all, expressed the relationship of the group, forming brush strokes in a living painting.

From my car, I couldn’t hear them, but I imagined the melange of sounds and accents. The cooing with a Cantonese or Vietnamese accent, the baby gurgling. The silent redhead. The older couple’s still-southern drawl and the Oaktown sound of all the teenagers, regardless of their ethnicity.

Given the extensive routes of the buses that stop there, the people could have been from almost anywhere in Oakland. Probably not the hills. From Eastlake. Fruitvale. East Oakland. West Oakland.

You could take a guess who might be going where, the older Asian woman playing with the baby could be going to Eastlake. The baby and his too-young mom going to the Fruitvale. The older African-American couple and the slight red-haired woman might have been headed toward West Oakland.

But you might be surprised by their destinations, too. Almost any of them could be going anywhere in Oakland. That’s the kind of city it is.

For that moment at a bus stop on 40th Street, the people weren’t from parts of Oakland. They were Oakland. A bus stop pastiche, I thought, that could have been a mural depicting diversity. Another of Oakland’s ubiquitous scenes that are so mixed they almost seemed staged. They aren’t.

Mixed and comfortable. The older woman playing with the baby only cared that it was a baby. The too-young mother didn’t object. The red-haired woman seemed oblivious. The older woman sitting on the bench, the older man and his companion in the wheelchair, all three unfazed by the antics of the teenagers. I’m pretty sure they didn’t recognize themselves as a poster of diversity.

The stop light changed and I drove off, leaving the scene behind. I didn’t see who got on the same bus going the same way or which ones went separate ways.

So they remain there at a bus stop on a sunny weekend afternoon. Preserved in my memory as a pastiche of Oakland’s easy, ubiquitous, comfortable diversity.

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